Oprah's guards not only ones to assail Indian journalists

Oprah Winfrey's first visit to India brought delighted
coverage by the Indian media. Her meetings
and tweetings with Bollywood stars, her bright orange sari, and her trips to
slums and to the Taj Mahal were lovingly detailed by newspapers and TV outlets in that
country.

Their love was not reciprocated, at least not by Winfrey's security
detail.

Police today detained three local bodyguards protecting
Winfrey after they allegedly damaged journalists' video equipment in a scuffle,
according to international
and local news reports. The incident occurred outside a temple Winfrey was
visiting in Mathura, about 90 miles south of Delhi.

In a video
posted by CNN-IBNLive, it appears that bodyguards lashed out at journalists
for getting too close to the talk show icon. The three guards were released
after writing an apology letter to the journalists, The Associated Press
reported, citing Press Trust of India.

Violent attacks against journalists are common in India, according
to CPJ research. CPJ has documented assaults
on journalists in Kashmir, where clashes between Indian forces and
insurgents put reporters at risk, and in
Orissa, where reporting on industrialization and Maoists has met violent
reprisal.

Worse, 27
journalists have been killed in India because of their work since 1992.
Away from the glare of a celebrity visit, these attacks on journalists didn't
receive the same attention from police or Indian authorities. India ranks 13th on
CPJ's
Impunity Index, meaning that its record of justice in the killings of
journalists is among the world's worst.

The message to Indian journalists? If you're going to get
attacked, don't expect much help from your government--unless Oprah Winfrey is
nearby.

Kristin Jones, a consultant to CPJ's Asia program, is an independent investigative reporter. In 2011, she was part of a team that won a Robert F. Kennedy Journalism Award for "Seeking Justice for Campus Rapes," a collaboration between NPR and the Center for Public Integrity. Jones was CPJ's senior Asia research associate until 2007. She led writing on the CPJ report "Falling Short," which documented press freedom abuses in China ahead of the 2008 Olympic Games.

Comments

I am reproducing below the report from the "local media" -- which is both more detailed and less alarming than the ABC report.

While I am mindful of the general situation of threats to journalists in India, and of course condemn them, this incident is hardly in the same ballpark. Moreover, it might be appropriate to report an additional statistic of "journalists killed per million population," in which, I suspect, India would not rank so poorly.

LUCKNOW: Three bodyguards of US reality television show host Oprah Winfrey were taken into custody by the police in Mathura following a scuffle with media persons in Vrindavan on Thursday. The popular TV host was in Mathura in connection with her latest reality show titled Next Chapter. The trio was later let off after they tendered a written apology in connection with the scuffle in which the equipments of some news channels were damaged.

The incident took place around 1.00 pm, when Oprah, flanked by two security men from America backed by another 12 odd bodyguards from a private Indian security agency reached Vrindavan and journalists, waiting for some sound and visual bytes, approached the TV personality. As cameramen tried to get closer to Oprah, the bodyguards who had formed a human chain around her, intercepted them. In the process some of the bodyguards allegedly pushed a couple of journalists back, leading to a scuffle in which equipment was damaged.

The situation turned ugly, when the journalists allegedly retaliated by pushing back the bodyguards. This triggered a free for all kind of situation.